Green is in. Let’s keep it there

Here’s your weekly Science Matters column by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola.

Welcome to 2008. If you had told me at the beginning of last year that
2007 would be the breakout year for the environment, I probably
wouldn’t have believed you. Yes, 2006 had An Inconvenient Truth, but
2007 saw the environment become a true media darling.

As
great as this has been, we mustn’t forget that news is a fickle beast
and, by definition, “new” doesn’t last very long. That means we need to
keep the interest moving forward or we could lose the momentum we’ve
built up.

We’ve come a pretty long way in two years. In 2006, people started
paying attention to the environment again. It was like society woke up
from a collective environmental slumber, looked around with bleary
eyes, blinked and asked, “What’s going on?” And people started to look
for answers.

In 2007, the media got on board. Environmental
stories made front-page news all year long. Books about the environment
became best-sellers. Magazines from home design to celebrity gossip
suddenly had environment pages or “green” tips. Eco-this and
Enviro-that became commonplace. My local newspaper, the Vancouver Sun,
actually invited me to be guest editor and has seen a newfound interest
in environmental stories.

But for those of us old enough to
remember back a couple decades, this might seem like déjà vu. In the
late 80s and early 90s, the environment was also a top public concern.
Governments poured money into environment ministries. Corporations
developed environmental stewardship platforms. Municipalities across
the country rolled out blue-box recycling programs.

And the
people cheered. Problem solved! Now they could go back to worrying
about more manageable individual priorities like paying bills, going to
work and providing for their families. Of course, we all know now that
the problem wasn’t solved by a long shot. But we lost a decade of
potential progress because people slipped into complacency. And who can
blame them? No one wants to deal with something as big and complicated
as our global environment.

The thing is, we don’t have a choice
anymore. Leading scientists have been telling us for decades that we
are on a very dangerous path. The good news is that it is not too late
to change the route we are on. There are alternative ways to live that
are in balance with Earth’s life support systems. But getting on a new
path requires real change.

So what does “real change” mean?
For governments, giving money to an environment ministry only to have
its mandate trounced by the ministry of natural resources, energy or
finance won’t cut it. For corporations, token efforts like a “green”
building design or energy efficient lighting won’t cut it if your
bottom line is still profits at the expense of the environment. For
individuals, using re-usable bags instead of plastic, or carrying a
re-usable coffee cup will do little if you’re still driving to work
every day.

If it sounds like a challenge, that’s because it
is. Real solutions are never easy and there will be lots of arguments.
We will also make mistakes. But the only real failure will be if we
don’t try at all. We’ve only got one Earth, so we can’t very well just
wait and see what happens if we continue with business as usual. That
path may look easy now, but in the near future it will make things
very, very hard.

So what does this all mean?

It means it’s time to dig deeper.

We
already have the public’s attention, but now we need to get serious
about solutions. We know how hard it is to be environmentally
responsible. Many of our daily decisions are not good for the
environment because they are easier and often cheaper to make. Still,
challenge yourself, challenge your neighbors, challenge your friends
and co-workers to make Canada a global warming problem-solver, not a
problem-maker.

Large-scale changes also require corporate and
government leadership. But here, too, individual action can have great
power. Politicians and business leaders know the public is concerned,
but they are slow to respond unless really pushed. If you really want
to make a big difference in 2008 – push them. Push them hard. Change is
underway. Real change is happening. Let our leaders know there’s
nothing that can stop it.